ChatGPTTL;DR
- "Electrical estimating software" is two products. One prices a panel upgrade on a tablet in the customer's garage from a flat-rate book. The other counts 4,000 devices off a plan set, applies labor units and prices the material for a commercial bid. Every figure here is the vendor's own page on November 2, 2026.
- Service quoting: Housecall Pro $59 to $299 a month billed annually, Jobber $29 to $149 for one user, Service Fusion $208 to $533 with unlimited users. ServiceTitan, FieldEdge and now Workiz print no price. Flat-rate books add $39 to $99 per tech a month.
- Bid estimating with a printed price: TurboBid $1,395 one time or $135 a month, Trimble Estimation MEP Pro $1,950 a user a year, Best Bid $2,500 one time, Vision InfoSoft $1,549 to $4,549. McCormick, ConEst IntelliBid, Trimble Accubid and Countfire all say "Request a demo."
- The labor units are the product. McCormick ships "three levels of NECA's labor units," Accubid and IntelliBid ship "industry standard" units without naming the publisher, and NECA's own Manual of Labor Units is free to members and about $299 to everyone else.
- AI counts symbols; it does not estimate. Trimble measured 4,000 US contractors in the first half of 2026 and found object counting 60 percent faster, with every count going "to an estimator for review." McCormick's auto-count is still on a roadmap.
- Skip the $4,549 bid suite if you never see a plan set, and skip any tool whose pricing page is a PNG.
Google serves this keyword 1,700 times a month and the answers it returns are from two different industries. Housecall Pro and Jobber are built for the electrician who quotes a panel swap in the driveway from a price book. McCormick, Trimble Accubid and ConEst IntelliBid are built for the electrical contractor who bids a hospital wing from 200 sheets of drawings, 140,000 catalog items and a labor-unit table that says a 20-amp duplex receptacle takes a stated fraction of an hour to install. ServiceTitan draws the line on its own electrical estimating page: it "doesn't perform on-screen takeoff directly from uploaded plan files, but it's built to receive your takeoff data," and it names McCormick, Conest and Trimble Accubid as the tools that produce it. So this post is in two halves, service quoting first and bid estimating second, with every price read from the vendor's page on November 2, 2026. Where a vendor prints nothing, we quote the button. If the estimate queue rather than the estimate is the problem, the electrician leads post ranks the channels that fill it and our free website audit is the fastest check on the site.
Two products share one name
A residential electrical estimate is a price book and a presentation. The tech opens the app, taps "200-amp panel replacement," the flat-rate book returns a customer price that already carries labor plus overhead and margin, and the customer sees one, three or five options on the tablet. The software that does this is a field service platform plus a flat-rate book that is sometimes bundled and usually sold separately. ServiceTitan's electrical page calls this "Good-Better-Best Proposals (Residential Service and Replacement)," and its 2025 survey of more than 1,000 residential contractors found that 54 percent of thriving companies present three options on at least half their jobs while struggling ones do it on fewer than 10 percent.
A commercial electrical estimate starts with a drawing set. Somebody counts every receptacle, switch, fixture and panel, measures every conduit and feeder run, assigns each item a labor unit from a table, prices the material against a supplier feed, and rolls it into a bid with the job's conditions factored in: ceiling height, floor, prevailing wage, difficulty. That is the half of the market McCormick has sold to for 45 years, and where ConEst, Trimble Accubid, TurboBid, Vision InfoSoft and Best Bid compete. None of them writes a flat-rate repair ticket. Buy from the half that matches the work that pays your payroll, and if you need the office side as well, the electrician CRM guide covers dispatch and the rest.
Service and replacement quoting, priced
Annual-billing figures first where a vendor prints both. Ratings are Software Advice and Trustpilot on November 2; Capterra, GetApp and G2 block our reads, and Software Advice shares one Gartner review pool with both, so one count stands for three.
| Tool | Price as printed | Quoting features that matter | Ratings, Nov 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Housecall Pro | Basic $59, Essentials $149 for 5 users, Max $299 for 8 users a month billed annually ($79, $189, $329 monthly); $35 per extra user on Max; 14-day trial, no card, no contract | Price book on every plan, flat-rate pricing on Essentials, good-better-best sales proposal tool on Max ("$40/mo value"); a Profit Rhino book is sold through it | 4.7 across 2,749 on Software Advice; 2.9 across 700 on Trustpilot |
| Jobber | Core $29, Connect $99, Grow $149 a month for one user billed annually ($49, $139, $199 with no commitment); Grow for 5 users $229; $29 per added user | Quotes on Core, automated quote follow-up on Connect, optional line items and rich-visual quotes on Grow; no electrical flat-rate book | 4.6 across 1,489; 4.2 across 234 |
| ServiceTitan | No price printed; "per-technician pricing" and "Request Pricing" on Starter, Essentials and The Works | Pricebook that "pulls from industry supplier catalogs," mobile estimates, good-better-best proposals, line-item estimates that import a takeoff; its electrical page claims 17 percent average revenue growth with no method | 4.3 across 342; 4.0 across 423 |
| FieldEdge | No price printed; "Request Pricing" on Select, Premier and Elite; "does not offer a free trial" | Pricebook and flat-rate pricing on every tier; single-option quotes on Select, multi-option on Premier; Proposal Pro good-better-best "Call for Pricing" below Elite; FieldEdge Flat Rate is the former Coolfront book with electrical repairs | 4.2 across 314; 2.8 across 47 |
| Service Fusion | Starter $208, Plus $325, Pro $533 a month billed annually ($245, $382, $627 monthly); unlimited users; no contract | Estimates with a single option on Starter, multiple options on Plus, eSign and customer portal on Pro | 4.3 across 308; 2.5 across 6 |
| Workiz | No price printed as of November 2; Standard, Pro and Ultimate all read "Request pricing"; 7-day trial | Estimates on every plan; sales proposals and flat rate on Ultimate; its electrical page claims both "30%" and "22%" revenue gains in the same scroll | 4.4 across 218; 2.0 across 127 |
| Kickserv | Start $60 for 5 users, Run $119 for 10, Scale $199 for 20 a month billed annually; 30-day trial | Estimates and invoicing; no price book or proposal tool named | 4.4 across 387; no Trustpilot reviews |
| Profit Rhino SmartPrice | Starter $39, Plus $49, Pro $59 per tech a month; coaching and implementation fee required, amount not printed; Integrate license $299 a month to feed another platform's book; no contracts | Prebuilt flat-rate book with an electrical edition, quarterly updates, OEM search; Pro adds the tablet sales tool | No reviews on either site |
| The New Flat Rate | "Pricing starts at $99/month per tech"; six plans that differ by onboarding, not software, with no dollar figures printed | Five-option menu pricing with an Electrical module; bolts onto ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro or FieldEdge | No Trustpilot profile |
| Verdict | Housecall Pro Essentials at $149 with flat-rate pricing for a residential shop under eight users, Max at $299 if you want the proposal tool inside. Jobber Grow at $149 for the shop that sells optional line items. Add Profit Rhino at $39 to $59 a tech the day your price book is still a spreadsheet. | ||
Workiz is the change since our HVAC post a day earlier. Its pricing page now prints "Request pricing" on all three plans and not one dollar figure, which puts it with ServiceTitan and FieldEdge as a sales-call product. The Workiz reviews post covers what its 2.0 on Trustpilot is about, and most of it is contracts. The three request-only platforms are the right answer for a 15-truck electrical company with a dispatcher, and all three ask you to take the call to find out what that costs.
The flat-rate book is the part that knows a GFCI replacement is a stated number of minutes at your rate with your markup, and on every platform above it is either a second product or an empty table you fill. Profit Rhino prints the clearest prices at $39, $49 or $59 per tech a month plus a coaching fee it does not print; The New Flat Rate starts at $99 per tech for its five-option menus; FieldEdge folds its Coolfront-based book into every tier at no printed price. ServiceTitan's survey numbers explain why the book earns its fee: beyond the three-option gap, 47 percent of contractors over $10 million in revenue said following up on estimates produces 11 to 15 percent of their income. Options and follow-up are features on the cards above.
share of thriving residential contractors presenting good, better and best options on at least half their jobs, against struggling ones, across more than 1,000 HVAC, electrical and plumbing contractors (ServiceTitan 2025 Residential Services Report, Thrive Analytics)
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Bid estimating and takeoff, priced
These tools price a drawing set. The electrical-specific suites carry a catalog, a labor-unit table and a supplier price feed in one program; the general takeoff tools below them count and measure, then export quantities for one of the suites or a spreadsheet to price. Four of the biggest names print no price at all.
| Tool | Price as printed | What it carries for electrical | Term, trial, rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| McCormick Electrical | No price printed; the /pricing URL serves a 112 by 140 pixel PNG; "Request A Demo," "Call Toll Free" | 55,000+ items, 25,000 prebuilt assemblies, US and Canada databases; "our labor units plus three levels of NECA's labor units," prevailing wage tables and adjustable units for all 50 states; auto-count and patented Auto Home Run takeoff | On-premises or hosted; part of Foundation Software; 4.4 across 118 on Software Advice |
| Trimble Accubid Anywhere | No price printed; "one consistent subscription"; "Request a demo" | Cloud estimating with LiveCount AI auto-count, "preloaded standard industry labor rates" or your own, and Trade Service material pricing included | Named-user subscription; no trial printed; no Software Advice profile at the slugs we tried |
| Trimble Accubid Classic | No price printed; "Estimating Essentials" and "Essentials Hosted" subscriptions; "Request a demo" | 42,000 items and 13,000 assemblies; "Labor units, labor factoring, labor tracking and cost codes are built right into the program"; AI takeoff only on the Hosted subscription | Subscription; TRA-SER pricing sold alongside |
| Trimble Estimation MEP Pro | $1,950 per user a year, US only, "Buy now" | AI 2D takeoff, "the included industry standard set of labor units," hundreds of thousands of items with Trade Service and Luckins list prices, distributor pricing | Annual; no trial printed; positioned for small MEP contractors |
| Trimble TRA-SER for Contractors, Electrical | $1,260 per user a year, "Buy online" | The material price feed itself: Supplier Xchange, "nearly 20M items" priced through it annually; imports into most estimating systems | Annual; Enterprise for 5+ on request |
| ConEst IntelliBid | No price printed; "priced by edition and number of users" across Standard, Plus and Pro; "Request a Demo" | 140,000 items and 500,000 assemblies; "pre-installed industry standard labor units, six levels of labor difficulty, and Auto Labor Factoring" for height, floor and run length; SureCount patented auto-count; NetPricer, EPIC and TRA-SER feeds "paid separately" | Local install or CE Cloud; no trial printed; version 10; since 1989 |
| TurboBid Electrical | $1,395 one time (regular $1,620), $135 a month plus a $350 setup fee refunded if you convert, or four payments of $399; $3,090 bundled with PlanSwift; TurboCloud pricing database $99 a month or $949 a year; support $350 a year after the first six months | Residential and light commercial bids plus flat-rate and service estimates; its own labor units auto-adjusted by floor and ceiling construction; weekly vendor price files | 14-day trial, no refunds; Windows only, Mac needs Parallels; 4.6 across 29 on Software Advice |
| Vision InfoSoft Electrical Bid Manager | Standard $1,549, Plus $2,749, Pro $4,549 on the version comparison page, which does not say whether that is one time or a year and also prints "$Call for best pricing"; the FAQ says "less than $1,000/year" | 20,000 items with 1.8 million more through Vision's EPIC pricing service; three labor columns per item, six on higher editions, "NECA labor column for change orders"; 13 to 17 takeoff modules; PlanSwift plug-in | Annual subscription for updates, price not printed; EPIC 30-day trial; 4.2 across 32 |
| Best Bid | Next Generation $2,500 one time, "unlimited license," lifetime updates; Hybrid Pro $1,999.95; Server Addition $3,500; Real Time Pricing $33 a month after a trial; $500 down and $134 a month for 15 months interest free | Unlimited database, labor adjusted by percentage on each assembly, NetPricer or Real-Time Pricing feeds; $500 online estimating school | Walkthrough, no software trial; 4.9 across 33 on Software Advice; pricing page copyright still 2024 |
| Countfire | No price printed; /pricing redirects to the contact page; "Start trial" | AI symbol counting across a drawing set with Smart Select naming, Excel quote with pre-priced items; UK roots (Kier, Engie) with a US site | Trial, length not printed; 4.8 across 250 on Software Advice |
| PlanSwift | Essential $2,000, Core $3,000 a year per seat | Electrical page with Auto Count across 10 pages and an "80% head start" from Takeoff BOOST on Core; formulas you build for labor units and material; no electrical database | 14-day trial of Core, no card; 4.3 across 402 |
| STACK Takeoff & Estimate | Free tier; Premium $299, Pro $349 a user a month billed annually | Takeoff with symbol search; regional BNI cost library and proposals on Pro; no electrical labor units | 12-month terms; 4.5 across 1,400 |
| Togal AI | Growth $299 a user a month billed yearly; Business custom at 4+ users | Counts, lengths and areas off the PDF; "Conductor sizing, voltage drop, and NEC review remain with your estimating team and your estimating software"; exports to Excel, ServiceTitan, Zebel, Ediphi | No trial; see our Togal AI review |
| Kreo | Essential $100, Pro $175, Business $250 a user a month billed annually | AI takeoff on Pro with a company cost database; electrical trade page; CAD and DWG input | 7-day trial; one Trustpilot review |
| Bluebeam | Basics $260, Core $330, Complete $440, Max $590 a user a year | PDF markup and measurement with counts; Max adds AI drawing reviews and comparisons, not auto-count | 14-day trial; 4.7 across 979 |
| Verdict | TurboBid at $1,395 for a residential or light commercial contractor bidding a few jobs a month from drawings. Trimble Estimation MEP Pro at $1,950 a year for the small commercial shop that wants labor units and live material pricing in one seat with a printed price. McCormick, IntelliBid or Accubid once you have a full-time estimator and a sales call does not scare you. | ||
The labor-unit table is what separates an electrical estimating suite from a takeoff tool, and it is the thing to ask about on the demo. McCormick is the only vendor that names its source: "our labor units plus three levels of NECA's labor units," with prevailing wage tables for all 50 states. ConEst says "pre-installed industry standard labor units" with six difficulty levels and does not name a publisher. Trimble says "the included industry standard set of labor units" on Estimation MEP and "preloaded standard industry labor rates" on Accubid Anywhere, also without naming one. Vision InfoSoft lists a "NECA labor column for change orders" as a feature row. TurboBid and Best Bid use their own units with adjustments by floor or by percentage. The reference itself is NECA's Manual of Labor Units, which a third-party trade article dates to 1923 and says is in a 2025 to 2027 edition with a complimentary two-year subscription for NECA members; NECA's own store blocked our read, and the only price we could see was a bookseller listing the prior edition at $299. If you are not a NECA member and your software does not name NECA, you are estimating on the vendor's units, and you should time a few jobs against them.
Material pricing is the second line item. Trimble's TRA-SER feed is $1,260 a user a year on its own and included in Accubid Anywhere and Estimation MEP; ConEst sells IntelliBid with NetPricer, EPIC and TRA-SER as separately licensed feeds; Vision's EPIC covers "over 2 million electrical items" with a 30-day trial and no printed price; TurboBid's TurboCloud database is $99 a month or $949 a year; Best Bid's Real Time Pricing is $33 a month after a trial. Budget the feed with the seat.
What the pricing pages will not tell you
Four of the five most-cited electrical estimating suites print no price, and the way they decline is informative. McCormick's pricing URL redirects to a 1,228-byte image file, 112 pixels wide, which has been there since at least September 2025 by its upload path. ConEst's pricing URL redirects to a tips article about pricing material inside IntelliBid, and its FAQ answers "How much does IntelliBid cost?" with "priced by edition and number of users ... Request a demo for a quote scoped to your shop." Trimble prints $1,950 for Estimation MEP Pro and nothing for either Accubid, and Countfire's pricing link lands on a contact form. Best Bid's comparison pages put numbers on the silence, claiming "Accubid → $5,000 to $15,000+ per user per year" and a "typical range" of "$3,000 to $5,000 per user per year" for subscription competitors. Those are a competitor's claims with no source, so we print them as that and not as Accubid's price. Software Advice's listings are no better: it prints McCormick "starting at $300.00 per user per month," Countfire "$49.99 per month" and Service Fusion "$259.00" when the vendor's own page says $208, so do not budget from a review site.
Vision InfoSoft is the odd case: it prints prices and then contradicts them. The version comparison page lists Standard at $1,549, Plus at $2,749 and Pro at $4,549 under two headers, prints "$Call for best pricing" under a third, never says whether the figures are a one-time license or a yearly fee, and the product FAQ says "Get started for less than $1,000/year." Both can be true if the editions are perpetual licenses with a cheaper subscription path, but no page says so. Ask on the call, and get the answer in the quote.
Can AI do electrical estimating?
Google asks this under the keyword, and the vendors answer it more honestly than their homepages suggest. ConEst's FAQ: "AI can assist with parts of the work, such as finding information in an estimate, flagging unusual quantities or costs, and helping with takeoff. A bid still depends on an estimator's judgment about installation conditions" and the job's scope and risk. McCormick's June 2026 blog post: "AI does not independently decide what a job should cost," and its list of what AI cannot do includes "Replace local market knowledge or crew-specific productivity insight" and "Take responsibility for pricing decisions or bid strategy." McCormick's own auto-count, per its AI statement page, is still a roadmap item due in "3 to 8 months," with "Phase one: Availability of AI-assisted symbol detection for common electrical symbols." The oldest name in the category does not yet ship the feature.
Trimble is the only vendor with a stated sample. Its August 7, 2026 post reports results from "more than 4,000 contractors in the U.S." using Accubid and Estimation MEP's AI features in the first half of 2026: 300,000 drawing scales a month set automatically with 97 percent needing no change, object counting 60 percent faster against a manual three seconds per symbol across 460,000 objects a month, estimate comparison cut by 83 percent, and about two hours saved per user per month. The same post is explicit about the limit: "AI does not complete or finalize any part of the process. Initial counting and classifying of symbols goes to an estimator for review," and each count carries a confidence rating. Countfire sells the same step with a jab at the rest: "trialling AI tools you can't verify," against its "human-verified accuracy." Togal's electrical page states where it stops: conductor sizing and NEC review "remain with your estimating team and your estimating software." The work that the symbol count feeds, the labor units, the material feed, the conditions and the markup, is untouched by every AI feature on every page we read.
The contractors agree. ServiceTitan's 2026 Commercial State of the Trades report, a July survey of 1,020 commercial owners and managers "primarily in mechanical, electrical and plumbing," found that 62 percent had piloted or deployed AI and 59 percent of users report a positive impact, but only 15 percent report "a significant positive impact with clear ROI." Estimating is on the list of expected uses behind scheduling and dispatch at 37 percent and predictive maintenance at 31 percent. The AI for electricians post ranks the eleven uses that do show ROI, and the AI estimating software roundup prices the takeoff tools across every trade with their accuracy claims traced. One caveat for the roofers reading an electrical post by mistake: your input is an address rather than a drawing, so a satellite measurement tool like RoofMammoth (ours, $48 to $90 a month) replaces the takeoff step entirely. No electrical equivalent exists, because the panel schedule is on the sheet and not on the roof.
Three to skip
Skip the full bid suite if you never see a plan set. A service electrician running Housecall Pro Essentials at $149 with a Profit Rhino book at $39 a tech has an estimating stack; McCormick, IntelliBid and Accubid are for the contractor with a dedicated estimator and a bid calendar, and the first thing they will ask on the demo is how many estimators you have. If the answer is "me, on Sundays," TurboBid at $1,395 covers the occasional residential bid off drawings.
Skip paying per seat for AI counting you cannot verify. Bluebeam Basics at $260 a year counts symbols by hand on a PDF, and the estimator who did it knows what was counted. Togal and STACK at $3,588 a seat a year make sense when the volume justifies a dedicated estimator, which is the vendor's own fit statement. At two bids a month, the AI's time savings on a 20-sheet set do not reach the subscription.
Skip any tool whose pricing page is an image, a redirect or a contact form until the quote is in writing with the labor-unit source, the material feed and the renewal terms on it. The electrician invoice template is for your customers; read the vendor's order form with the same care, because Best Bid, TurboBid and STACK all print no-refund or 12-month terms, and the Trustpilot reviews on STACK and PlanSwift are about exactly that.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the best electrical estimating software?
For a residential service company, Housecall Pro Essentials at $149 a month billed annually with flat-rate pricing, or Max at $299 with the proposal tool, plus a Profit Rhino book at $39 to $59 per tech. For a contractor bidding from drawings, TurboBid at $1,395 one time for residential and light commercial work, Trimble Estimation MEP Pro at $1,950 a user a year for a small commercial shop, and McCormick or ConEst IntelliBid for a full estimating department. Prices are the vendor pages on November 2, 2026.
How much does electrical estimating software cost?
Service platforms with quoting run $29 to $533 a month billed annually: Jobber from $29 for one user, Housecall Pro $59 to $299, Service Fusion $208 to $533 with unlimited users. ServiceTitan, FieldEdge and Workiz price on request. Flat-rate books add $39 to $99 per tech a month. Bid estimating suites with a printed price run $1,395 one time (TurboBid) to $4,549 (Vision InfoSoft Pro), or $1,950 a user a year (Trimble Estimation MEP Pro); McCormick, IntelliBid, Accubid and Countfire quote on a demo. A material price feed adds $33 a month to $1,260 a year.
Can AI do electrical estimating?
AI counts and classifies symbols on a drawing and sets drawing scales; it does not assign labor units, price material or set the bid. Trimble's results from more than 4,000 US contractors in the first half of 2026 show object counting 60 percent faster, with every count going to an estimator for review. ConEst's FAQ says a bid "still depends on an estimator's judgment about installation conditions" and the risk, and McCormick's auto-count is still on its roadmap.
Does ServiceTitan do electrical takeoffs?
No. ServiceTitan's electrical estimating page says it "doesn't perform on-screen takeoff directly from uploaded plan files, but it's built to receive your takeoff data," and names McCormick, Conest and Trimble Accubid as the tools electrical contractors use to measure plans. ServiceTitan handles the pricebook, mobile estimates, good-better-best proposals and line-item estimates imported from a takeoff. It prints no price.
What are NECA labor units and does the software include them?
NECA's Manual of Labor Units is the electrical industry's reference for how long each installation task takes, published since 1923 and in a 2025 to 2027 edition that NECA members receive free. McCormick states that it ships "three levels of NECA's labor units." ConEst and Trimble describe their units as "industry standard" without naming NECA. Vision InfoSoft lists a NECA labor column for change orders. TurboBid and Best Bid use their own units. NECA's store blocked our read, and a bookseller listed the prior edition at $299.
Is there free electrical estimating software?
STACK's Takeoff and Estimate free tier is permanent with one active project a month. PlanSwift gives 14 days of Core with no card, TurboBid a 14-day trial, Housecall Pro 14 days on its Max plan, Kickserv 30 days, Workiz 7 days, and Bluebeam 14 days of Max. Vision InfoSoft's EPIC pricing feed has a 30-day trial. None of the electrical-specific suites with labor units is free past the trial, and McCormick, ConEst and Accubid offer demos rather than trials.